Cap De Creus, Catalonia

Dali Cadaques

Monday, 2017, August 7

In 1930, Dalí bought an old fisherman’s hut in Port Lligat, he wanted only one thing, to transform it into house for himself and Gala, his Russian wife. ‘We won’t have flowers, or dogs, only the arid landscape and our passion. We will grow old, with our intelligence, together’. He describes in his autobiography, that the house was one kilometer from the house where he was born in Cadaques, in Girona, an hour from Barcelona, only 40km from the French border. Today it is a museum that permits only eight visitors at a time.

Dalí met Gala in Paris in the 1920s whilst she was still married to the poet Paul Eluard. The house in Port Lligat now covers over two-hundred square meters, it is the result of many years work Dalí and Gala did, adding rooms and spaces, As he himself defined it, it was 'a true biological structure [...]. Each new pulse in our life has its own new cell, a room.'

The house is a few minutes from Cap de Creus the exclusive bay area now popular with upmarket french and italian families. Now a protected National Park, the unique geology of this region, inspired Dalí in his artworks and he adored this uniquely beautiful coastline. The Cap de Creus was Gala and Dalí’s romantic hideaway where they spent many hours swimming, boating, collecting washed up debris, they staged events, created installations and happenings here. In fact, Dalí’s great painting ‘ The Great Masturbator’ (1929) depicts a human face in the shape of the rock formations of Cape de Creus bay.

Dalí lived in this house until Gala died in 1982, when he moved in Pubol castle where he lived up until his death in 1989.